Making Time Matter

In an attempt to answer all my woes in my last entry I read; The Time Paradox: Using the New Psychology of Time to Your Advantage by Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd, Ebury Publishing (2008) http://www.thetimeparadox.com/

The main points I must focus on are:

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. Paradise Lost, Milton.

Your attitudes to time have a profound impact on your life. By changing the way you think about your past you change your future.

Ask yourself what you want to do today. Don’t ask what tasks you have to do today or what obligation you must meet before you can take time to enjoy yourself. Continually ask the big questions: What do I really want out of my life? What am I doing to get what I want? What is the best way to get from here to there?

‘We choose to rush and be busy. We can choose to slow down and cut back. This is in our power. But making such a choice is not easy.’ Ralph Keyes, Timelock. You need to do less, not more. Slim down your obligations. Eliminate as much as you can until you are in a comfort zone. Throw out the trash. Clean your closets of worn-out clothes. Stop going to events you don’t like. ‘Trying to increase one’s menu of possibilities contributes to overchoice, a key source of timelock. Reducing the range of options makes it possible to narrow ones focus and concentrate better.’ Ralph Keyes.

Only keep things from your past which make you happy. That includes thoughts / memories….. Reconstruct past negative experiences and either neutralize them or discover some hidden positive elements in them. Whenever you find yourself replaying the familiar old slides of past negative experiences, make yourself take out those slides and insert new slides into your memory tray. Practice viewing your new positive-only personal slide show to flood the dreary old past with a bright light of optimism. Forget about whether you had less love, success and good fortune than others in your life. That’s over and done with. Decide to become positive about your past and start afresh.

Life is what you make of it. You can make your time matter. Now is not the time to wait. Now is the time to act. Three days are all we have in which to live our lives. Yesterday was too early. Tomorrow will be too late. Today is the day of reckoning for each of us.

No man ever steps into the same river twice, for its not the same river and he’s not the same man. Heraclitus